Bitcoin Is Headed to $300K and Nobody's Ready | Bill Barhydt

Bill Barhydt is the founder and CEO of Abra. In this conversation, we break down why bitcoin is climbing despite rising rates and macro headwinds, where its next wave of demand will come from, and how the debt spiral drives inflation. We also discuss AI agents, the future of wealth management, tokenized yield, and how Abra is building a neo-banking stack for crypto. ===================== Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ===================== GalaxyOne is a financial technology platform built for people who want their cash working harder. → https://go.galaxy.app/HMiq/pomp Galaxy Premium Yield is an investment note issued by Galaxy Digital LP and guaranteed by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP. It is not a bank deposit, is unsecured, and is not FDIC or SIPC insured. U. S. accredited investors only. Cash deposits held at Cross River Bank, Member FDIC. Securities products are not FDIC insured, not bank guaranteed, and may lose value. GalaxyOne Crypto is not FDIC or SIPC insured. Terms apply. ===================== Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp ===================== 0:00 - Intro0:51 - Why bitcoin is rising despite macro headwinds4:08 - Shrinking volatility & bitcoin cycle returns9:15 - Is there a way out of the debt spiral?15:10 - AI is turning everyone into a software engineer20:17 - Why RIAs are falling behind27:48 - What Abra is building with tokenized yield & lending33:49 - Tokenization & the next generation of investors36:30 - AI financial advisors & regulation38:38 - The end of apps & the agentic future

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  If you look at the, the, the charts that everybody likes to show with global M2 versus Bitcoin, they're all saying Bitcoin should be around 250 to 300K ish in that range. That feels right to me based upon where the markets are going. I was at the Treasury Conference yesterday and I heard somebody say, hey, if, if Bitcoin's not at 300K in 24 months, then my thesis on Bitcoin was completely wrong.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  What's going on, guys? Today we've got a great conversation with Bill Barhite. He's the founder and CEO of Abra. In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with Bitcoin, the macro backdrop. Why Bitcoin is likely to be worth much, much more in the future, but why is it not there yet? Then we also talk about tokenization, artificial intelligence, agents, and what's going on in the RIA space. And then we dig into Abra and what he's doing there with liquidity, lending, and many other things that most people are interested in. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Bill Barhite. All right, Bill, it seems like Bitcoin's at a very interesting point right now. Every single micro economic point says that Bitcoin should be lower. You've got oil at higher prices. You've got the 10 year blowing out, you know, over 5%. You've got an interest rate hike. It's just like, all that should be headwinds. Bitcoin is higher, though. Clarity failed, Bitcoin is higher. What does that tell you about the price of Bitcoin and where it could be going?

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so I do believe that Bitcoin tracks liquidity to a large degree, but I also think there's a certainty slash uncertainty factor that has played into all of this. With the Trump trade and, you know, everything else going on around clarity. I think having clarity that we're not going to check clarity was in and of itself a good thing because I think markets just don't like ambiguity, right? And I think the next level of ambiguity is the midterms, which are probably not going to end well for this administration, but at least we'll have less ambiguity. Right? I think the markets, the bond markets have known all along that rates are going higher, at least in the short term.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  And, and so I think that this administration desperately wanted lower rates. That ship sailed a while ago and it's not going to happen now. I thought maybe they would figure it out with yield curve control, but it just wasn't going to happen. And, and so I think to a degree, you know, Bitcoin has, has done runs with higher rates than where we're at now. Right? But it's the liquidity that ultimately Bitcoin needs to catch up to. And I think that the gap between, if you look at the, the, the charts that everybody likes to show with global M2 versus Bitcoin, they're all saying Bitcoin should be around 250 to 300K ish in that range. That feels right to me based upon where the markets are going.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I was at the Treasury Conference yesterday and I heard somebody say, hey, if, if Bitcoin's not at 300K in 24 months, then my thesis on Bitcoin was completely wrong. Right? And I probably should have, should have just dumped it at 70K.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  So if Bitcoin is not at 300K in 24 months, this person said that

• 3:57Speaker 03

  My thesis on Bitcoin was just wrong because, you know, like it's not, it's right. Or, or, right? I'm, I'm super excited that, you know, we've instituted austerity. The government is acting responsibly. And, you know, I'm super bullish on the future of our monetary system and, you know, the banking system. And obviously, you know, the, the point being that none of that is going to happen in this person's opinion. And therefore Bitcoin should continue along its, you know, previous trajectory of shrinking volatility with runups in between, which we thought maybe that wasn't going to happen, but it looks like that is the case where we are going to basically continue these runups at least for one more cycle with shrinking volatility.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  At least that's how I see it playing out. And then we'll see, right? I mean, it does make sense that as it gets more and more adopted, the interest cycle volatility should shrink. And that's, look, if, if, if the lows were in in the 50s, then the volatility shrunk significantly from the last cycle, which happened versus the previous cycle, right? And so if that continues, you know, we'll get Bitcoin at, at a couple of million, but you know, at a slower rate.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  There's a lot of people who are very excited about lower volatility when it's going against them and going down. Rightfully so. Now, if we go back to, uh, let's use the, I guess, 2018 to like 2021 cycle. Bitcoin bottom somewhere on 3200 and then went away at $69,000. So call it 30 ish X, give or take. Last cycle, we went from 15, 16K to 125 ish. So call it, you know, eight X or so. That's a pretty big compression of volatility on the upside. Now, there is one argument that says, oh, that's because no one really knew about Bitcoin. All this capital is going to flow in. AI agents are going to, you know, increase the addressable market. And actually it's going to go back to 10, 20, 30X type returns.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Traditionally, history would tell us actually the volatility will continue to compress. And so in the next up cycle, if you just cut it in half, Bitcoin would only get a three to four X. Sure. Right? So how do you think about like squaring those two things of like the fundamentals of the industry versus just like big numbers are hard to keep growing at very high rates?

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's also the, the power law basically says if we're going to go to a, what does it take us to be like a $20 trillion industry? It's very hard to justify going from 20 to 50, the same way we went from, I mean, I remember when Bitcoin hit a billion, right? And everybody was like, oh my God, this thing is way overpriced. Right? And, and that's intra tech movements now, literally intra tech movements for Bitcoin, right? So, so, you know, but going from 10 trillion or where are we at now? Five trillion to 20 trillion. That's a massive, you know, movement in absolute terms, regardless of what it means for Bitcoin on a relative basis.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  And, and so you get to a point where you got to say, okay, well, where is all of this value coming from? What are people selling to buy Bitcoin? Are they taking cash off the sidelines? Are they selling treasuries? Right? The government is highly incentivized for that not to happen. We have a massive 6040 allocation problem in the wealth management space. And, and, and the Treasury Department knows this. And that if, if all of these customers of RIA start selling the 50, the 40% of the portfolio, interest rates are just going to keep climbing and climbing and climbing because the demand for their shit debt is, is just not existent. And, and so, you know, like that is the most likely scenario for Bitcoin climbing higher is the reallocation.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And that's not a, it, it, it almost looks like a death spiral in some way. But even that death spiral can't get Bitcoin to 100 trillion, right? It's just not enough money.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  This is a very interesting point that I don't think a lot of people quite understand, right? So let me use maybe something that the Bitcoiners have wrapped their head around, which is like this digital credit. So if, you know, SATA or a stretch, they wanted to get more capital, they could raise the interest rate. If they feel like they've got too much demand, they could lower the interest rate. And so they're using the interest rate as basically an incentive tool to how much capital they want to raise.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  With a stated par, par value around underlying.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  There's, I'm like dumbing this down significantly, right? The US government, to a degree, the Treasury, uh, yield kind of does the same thing, right? The higher the yield, obviously the more people want to put their capital in, the lower the yield, more capital comes out. What you're essentially saying is like, if they don't feel like there's enough demand, it is a negative reinforcing thing where they have to keep ratcheting it up to get that demand to show up. Right? And if that yield keeps going higher and higher and higher. That changes things.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  The lever is inflation because somebody has to pay, right? So when, when you're printing money to service your own debt in, in, you know, right? We're physically printing money, but logically we're basically printing money to service our debt.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  We don't even have to print it anymore. We just change numbers in a database.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, so what does that actually mean? It means that, you know, remember, well, we weren't there, but, but if you read history during World War II, we had these war bond things where everybody would go out and say, support the war effort, buy bonds. Well, that would, the more people, the more demand there was, one, the more money they could raise. But two, the more they could raise at a lower interest rate, right? And so, so the, the way you deal with the lack of demand is you pay people more, right? And, and so what does that do? Well, it, it increases the cost of borrowing and you basically get into this vicious kind of circle or what I call death spiral almost. But if the government ends up being the buyer of last resort, which is historically what happens when nobody else wants to buy the debt, right? Where does that money come from?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Well, they print it and that's what causes inflation. So ultimately inflation is the, is the lever that goes up and down based upon the demand versus the amount of debt you want to create, right? Less debt means you don't need as much demand, which means inflation is less likely, right? Way more debt with less demand means you have to buy it, which means inflation is more likely. And that's where inflation ultimately comes from. Currency inflation, which leads to price inflation, right? And we're at this point now where I don't know how to get out of this vicious cycle.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  I was just gonna say, what, what is the solution? Just buy Bitcoin?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Stop doing stupid shit, right? So, so stop financing wars you can't afford, uh, stop policing the world, uh, stop, stop, you know, basically running massive deficits, building, you know, I, I, I was at the all in conference a couple of weeks ago, they showed the, the, the video of Nick Shirley, who is just amazing guy. Uh, the, the, the train, the train to nowhere, right? They, they laid, uh, what 100 feet of track for $20 billion.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Congratulations.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, congratulations, right? It could get nowhere fast. So where, where did this money go, right? So if we stop.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  We know where it went.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, right, exactly. But good luck proving, you know, putting them in jail. So, so if we stop spending the trillions of dollars we don't have, so, so the other part of this is the immorality of this, because what you're basically saying is I am committed to my quality of life at the expense of my grandkids, great grandkids and great, great grandkids quality of life unless something else changes. Now, of course, the bet is, well, productivity is going to go through the roof and our AI overlords and the, and the robots, which are basically going to create 10% GDP growth are going to save us all. And if that happens, couldn't be happier.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  That is a massive bet to take to say, hey, we're basically going to stave off disaster. And, you know, I actually, uh, spent a, a solid hour with Jordy Visser, your, your buddy yesterday. We had this, this pretty healthy debate about what does this all mean from a macro perspective? Cause his take is, is that, hey, you know, 40 trillion in debt is meaningless, right? Because we, we basically have infinite productivity capability now with what's coming in AI. And, and that may turn out to be true. And as a tech nerd who's basically made his entire career on exponential tech, that sounds amazing, but that is a huge bet to make with people's lives when the alternative all along could have been do the right thing. It's not that hard when you have the will.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  And, and, and by the way, we should have made it illegal to do the wrong thing, right? To start.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Technically, that was the spirit of the law was to prevent people from doing that stuff. It's just that when you have the people who make the rules incentivized to only make rules for everybody else, but not follow it themselves, then you get this like dual class in America where insider trading is legal or, you know, various other examples that we have seen, like, of course, I mean, for whatever you want to say about Charlie Munger and his beliefs in Bitcoin, the guy nailed, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And that will always be true. You know, look, I, I, I think that, um, we're, we're at a point now where Jordy needs to be right insofar that we really don't have a choice anymore.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Right? There's, there's, we, we have no choice but to let the death spiral play out and hope and pray that we can get massive productivity gains, which I find ironic because ultimately all of this is, uh, a tax on the middle class at the end of the day. And the productivity gains are actually a net benefit to the middle class because you're basically lowering inflation as you're servicing the debt. And these are the same people that are now basically crying that AI is bad, right? Which I find, uh, equally ironic, which is, you know, I, I actually think, um, and I'm not, I'm not one who's easily taken to, uh, conspiracy theories, but the mother of all psyops for the last six months has been who the geniuses who have figured out that they can basically,

• 13:51Speaker 03

  you know, influence, uh, American policy by subterfuge with this idea that data centers are bad and, you know, all this nonsense that, you know, I, I live in a state where, uh, well, I spend part of the year in a state where it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond. That's crazy. That is crazy, right? In a state that basically has severe multi-year droughts every 10 years like clockwork, right? And we're complaining about water and power usage for AI to the point now we're going to have to go spend trillions of dollars putting data centers in space when what we should stop doing, first of all, is stop growing almonds in the desert, maybe, uh, and, and focus on, you know, the real problems we have and let the tech do what it's done for

• 14:34Speaker 03

  50 years, which is increase productivity gains, increase quality of life, right? The, the lowest middle class people in this country carry a phone that is more powerful than the computers I worked on back in my NASA days. And everybody's complaining about quality of life. I do get that inflation is a problem, but there's nothing that, whether it's Harris in the White House or Trump in the White House, there is physically nothing that they can do, you know, to keep in, in inflation below 3% now. There is literally nothing that they can do because nobody has the political will to absorb the pain, right? So, so we should be embracing the things that can address the price inflation, right?

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Which is massive GDP growth, which is being solely driven by the AI trade right now.

• 15:24Speaker 04

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• 16:09Speaker 04

  You want to know, uh, something that I've been joking around the office about, but I a hundred percent believe is true. Up until six months ago, if somebody said, look at his career, look at what he's done, they'd be like, oh, he's a non-technical person who understands some business stuff. He invests, he operates businesses, does the media stuff, all that. Everything was non-technical. I'm gonna change my bio on Twitter to software engineer. I got the, I got the same capabilities as they do.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  I retrained myself.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  I now can, now do I have a computer science degree? Absolutely not. We have some of the best AI engineers that we have don't have computer science degrees, but it doesn't matter, right? It's just ultimately, can you produce the end result or not? The fact that my dumb ass now has that capability and was able to retrain myself in a relatively short period of time.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Okay, so there is.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  What is that gonna do? What is that gonna do?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  I'm gonna defend software engineering for a moment. There is a difference. And, and by the way, I.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  You're defending me, perfect.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. I, I, I agree with, I agree with 95% of what you just said. There's a difference though. The pure play software engineers have another two years of half-life. And the reason is I actually spend a ton of time right now, uh, with AI agents who are developing next gen stuff for Abra. And a, um, a, a non-technical product manager could not do what I'm doing.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Even though the AI is doing all of the, the heavy lifting in the background, I am having deep technical architecture discussions with the AI around next gen stuff, around tokenization, uh, yield generating platforms, uh, RIA level integration that, um, you know, the sales, a salesperson, for example, in our company couldn't, couldn't have, which is fine, right? Now, is that going to be true three years from now? I, I can easily see where that's not true, but I think it's going to be true for the next 24, 24 months. But if, I actually think that the, the, the, the big difference for companies like us is the difference between a product manager who, who, a technical product manager slash architect, software engineer, they're all becoming the same person.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that is the biggest change we've seen, which means that we need way fewer people to do the same task, which given that we're not getting, letting people go, means our productivity as a company is, is, is never been higher, never been higher.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Now, I'm somewhat joking about the software engineer.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  But you're not wrong.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  But there's a, now, the thing I will say is, I was a product manager at Facebook. And so there is this weird dynamic of like, if you've built products before.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  I know you're making a point, telling yourself short at the same time.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  But you can, you can, um, I, I'll tell you this, I, I've talked to a couple of people on, on our team and, uh, it was eye opening for me, but also I think a little scary for them because I said, by the way, you're doing the same thing. Talking on Slack to somebody, I turn, I talk to the chat, you know, AI agent, go back to Slack, I, I almost didn't care who was on the other end. Was it code or was it a human? I was just talking through a chat and work was getting done. By the way, that same, the person I was talking to, they were doing the same thing. They were talking to me on Slack, they were turning to an AI agent. And so like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second here. We all now are just interfacing with these chat bots, but sometimes there's a human on the other end and sometimes there's an agent and increasingly it's shifting to more and more agents.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  And so it does feel like, you know, the ground's shifting a little bit.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. I have, I'll, I'll tell you two stories. I, I've got this watch on, I've got the phone in my pocket.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  You got a great jacket, great things.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Keep going. I, I, I got time. Keep going. So, so

• 19:37Speaker 04

  Been working out. Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Keep going. No, it's good. So, so I get messages from my agents all day on the watch. Okay. Here's what, here's what I'm working on. Here's the status. Is it okay if I do this? Uh, I keep computers in certain places that are offline other than access to the bots via VPN. And so they'll say, hey, can I make this change to your systems? Because if, if I do, I can run this, this and this. And to the point now where I'm just pressing a button on my watch, right? To basically give agents permission to do things.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Coding on your watch.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Or I'll just basically talk into it, which it can now transcribe. And so like my, um, I have a Jarvis, which I affectionately call Max, which my, I've given my exec team at Abra and, and a couple of people in my personal life selective access to the first version. It was a nightmare because it was all or nothing. Meaning if the person was, was rogue, they would literally be able to basically say.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  What's, what's in his email?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But now I can literally give it selective access to, to, uh, my team members selective access. So like, so Max has like a legal Slack channel, a finance Slack channel. And she knows how to segregate that across different people, which, and, and that was six months ago that I couldn't do that, um, without massive amounts of custom coding work. And now I just tell her, tell her, you know, okay, do this. Um, and you know, so, so, but each person is now even able to access it via different channels, like via Slack, via, um, you know, I, I message or even via, via voice. Like I, I, I had it hack a custom, uh, voice channel so that you could basically on the, on the go, open up Safari on your browser and, you know, press a button and just talk to her.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and you're just having a two-way phone conversation.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Another thing that I, I have wrapped my head around, I think that the RIAs and like a lot of the people that you guys work with, it doesn't seem like this has hit them yet, but it's coming, is, um, all of the old software just became a database. So I catch myself now actually handling my highest priority email. I don't actually see it in my inbox first, an agent across one of the many platforms.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Me all the time.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Tells me, yeah, this, this is there.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  And then sometimes I just, hey, reply with this. Usually I'll go into the email, especially when it's like sensitive, you know, high priority and I'll go and I'll answer whatever. But the other thing is, um, I built a piece of software to help you kind of just like organize and priority list and all this stuff, whatever. And then recently I was like, you know, what if I hooked up Grok bot to the software that I built? So now I don't even have to go into that software and like, you know, there's a dropdown for like priority levels. And I was like, why not just tell Grok to do it? And then all, you know, it took me, I don't know, an hour, maybe.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  And I was like doing other work while I was building and all this stuff. And I was just like, okay, this is getting weird.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Awesome, but very weird.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, very weird.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  And so like, if you think of Abra's business, like you are interfacing with RIAs, you're dealing with money managers. Like this is a very regulated, very sensitive, you know, all this stuff. It doesn't yet feel like they're using all of this yet.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  They can't.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  So like, explain a little bit.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  So they're at a big disadvantage, right? When I say can't, it's, it's not totally true, but, but the disadvantage is, is, is it's a very heavily regulated business, which acts as a drag on, on speed of execution. Now, you, the, the positive spin on that is it's meant for investor protection, leveling the playing field. There's a ton of marketing rules, uh, you know, we, when we put out tweets about Abra, they have to go through, uh, an audit process, right? As an RIA, I just can't just basically say, okay, yields at 4%, have a nice day. Doesn't work that way for, uh, a wealth advisor. And then the SEC has the audit rights on everything you do.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  At most RIAs in this country, at some point get audited, not a financial audit, but like a best practices audit by the SEC. I'm not using the legal terms, but they'll come in and say, I want to see, I want to see your marketing materials. I want to see, you know, how your accounts are segregated. I want to see, you know, uh, the reality of how you price, uh, something, uh, versus how you market the pricing of something. And most industries don't have that. If you sell a widget online and for $5, you sell it online for $5. It's the marketing message isn't working. You change it the next day. You do split testing, right? You're a product manager. You know what A B testing is. It's very hard to do that in the wealth management world. That's part one. Part two, and a lot of these RIAs are my clients, so may not be, you know, a great thing for me to have to say.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  But the reality is a lot of them are not incentivized to talk to their customers. Why? Well, I just said, we have a big 60/40 allocation problem. Why does this problem persist? Because there's a mis-incentive, back to your other point about show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome, from RIAs who should be reallocating those portfolios, which have been a drag on returns for years. Not for the RIA itself, but for the consumer, they've been a drag on returns, right? Because the RIA's incentive is, don't move the assets, right? Because I get my one and a half or 2% of whatever it is, regardless of the outcome. When the right way to do this is, is the, the hedge fund world figured this out a long time ago. Yeah, you can basically get a small management fee, but really we should be aligned from a performance perspective.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  And I would go so far to say that, that most RIAs should be aligned with the beta of a market. Meaning, meaning I shouldn't even make money unless, maybe I take a, a fixed fee, right? Which would be a disaster for the RIA industry. And I, I basically say, on top of that fixed fee, there's a beta. Meaning if I just put your money in a 60/40 portfolio of, of a, a bond ETF and an S and P 500 tracking ETF, the beta is probably 5%. And with, with, and it would be higher if I put in a hundred percent S and P, but let's just call it 5%. I shouldn't make money more on anything under that 5%. And I have a hurdle rate, which, you know, of course there would be riots in the street.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Right, right. Nobody, no RIA would do that, certainly not voluntarily. But if you wanted to design the killer RIA in the AI era, it would be a fixed fee. It would be a beta of, of the market via some formula. And I'm going to do custom AI, uh, based portfolio construction and also have it be tokenized so that I can do a whole bunch of fancy things with your portfolio that I couldn't do before. And I think that's coming. And to your point, obviously they're not ready for this. The SEC is not ready for this, right? There are no rules that would easily, there's a robo-advisor category for advisors that could get away with this. But, but the people-based RIAs are, are, are woefully unprepared for this.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  They don't even run their own systems, most of them. They outsource them to other, other companies. And that's the companies that, you know, Abra is working to integrate with now so that RIAs can have access to crypto, have access to crypto-based yield, have access to lending, have access to the tokenized stocks that are coming down the pipe that we've been reading about from, you know, partnerships with NYSE and NASDAQ and their international, uh, brethren that, that Abra is in the middle of in order to facilitate loans against those tokenized shares and yield on tokenized shares. That is the future of portfolio construction. Now, we're preparing for that now, but the RIAs are going to have to completely change three things, in my opinion. One, they're going to have to rethink the speed at which they work.

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  They're going to have to re, which, and I would say is kind of a one, that's like one A, one B would be like, we have to rethink the value of the individual RIAs themselves, the people that are basically make, as fiduciaries that are making decisions. So number two, we're going to have to completely rethink how we do compliance and technology, right? Meaning, meaning like today, it's very rigid what we can offer clients, right? Because it all goes through compliance reviews and that's fine. I get, I get all that. But if you look at perpetual futures, prediction markets, uh, you know, tokenization, crypto, the, the, the RA market is shut out of all those products today. Not because it's illegal for them to sell it. It's just they don't know what to do.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  They literally don't know what to do, right? So, so we're working on next gen stuff that makes all of those things available. But more importantly, let's the RIA start to use AI-based tools to do portfolio construction in a way that the clients will understand. And they, they still have a person to interact with, say, let me explain to you, you know, what, what our Max is, is recommending for your situation today, which by the way, can change week to week, right? My portfolio should be adaptable week to week, month to month, however often I dictate. And maybe I want an active portfolio which changes every day, like a trader. Or I want to go to zero on stocks at the end of the week.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  You know, that may not be necessary in where this is going with 24/7 trading, but maybe I want it anyway, right? No RIA can do that today, right? You're starting over on Monday? What are you, what are you talking about? Their heads would explode, right? And so, you know, I think, um, this space is about to go through the biggest change in the US kind of financial industry versus everything we've seen for the last like 50 years.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  I think it's going to be seismic, right? What, what is the litmus at Abra? You guys have a number of things. You guys have, uh, yield focus. You've been doing lending, like talk just a little.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  So, so the, we, we went through this multi-year kind of transition and it's, it's finished now to, uh, being an RIA ourselves, which means we're a fiduciary for our clients, which means we have to do right by our clients, which is fantastic. Like our, our industry needs that. But it's actually merging with the traditional industry. So let me explain. So we started out, like, we, we offer, uh, the ability to custody Bitcoin, custody other crypto assets, earn yield on stable, your dollars, earn yield on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, whatever you're staking, staking yield. Fastest growing business has been borrowing against crypto, so borrowing against Bitcoin, borrowing against Ethereum, stuff that you and I have been involved with for, for many years now. And that's all been growing really well for us.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  We're starting to tokenize the yield. What does that mean? So today, if you want to earn yield on Bitcoin, you deposit the yield into an Abra separately managed account. Think of it like a vault and you earn yield and Bitcoin is, is auditable in, in the vault and you're earning yield. And then when you want to make a withdrawal, you just basically withdraw from the vault. We've now created tokens using this AbraFi platform, BTC AF for AbraFi, USD AF, where you actually are earning yield by on the Bitcoin. So Bitcoin in, Bitcoin plus more Bitcoin out, right? Dollars in, like Circle or Tether in, and Tether or more Circle out on the other side.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  That's what USD AF is, and you can trade them, just like I can trade normal Bitcoin or move them around. Uh, but it's basically tokenized yield. Why would I want to do that? Well, I can now take the yield-bearing tokens where Abra is using its, you know, powerful systems to generate that yield and use them as collateral for other things. That's interesting. So now if I'm gonna go borrow against my Bitcoin, I'm actually borrowing against Bitcoin that's also generating a yield, which massively offsets my borrow cost. Cause right now, the, the, the going cost in DeFi for borrowing against Bitcoin is about four and a half percent. Right? We're generating between three and four percent yield right now. Right? And, and I can't promise that that will be the yield in a year,

• 31:04Speaker 03

  but when you net those two, right, plus our fees, the cost of your loan is close to free. That is a fantastic, you know, deal, right? And so that's getting a lot of interest in the market. And you'll see those tokens, dollar yield-bearing, Bitcoin yield-bearing, Solana yield-bearing, using a bunch of DAPs that we're going to be announcing this year, both ourselves and with third parties, lending DAPs, futures DAPs. It's just awesome collateral. The other thing it does is because all of those tokens are being released on Solana first, any DAP that has the ability to absorb Solana tokens can now basically take multiple forms of collateral at the same time, which is the biggest problem in DeFi right now is what's the most pristine collateral in DeFi?

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Bitcoin. What's the problem with Bitcoin? Well, it's its own blockchain. And every DAP is running on its own blockchain, right? So Hyperliquid knows nothing about Bitcoin, uh, you know, and you pick your favorite. Ave knows nothing about Bitcoin, and we've solved that problem with, with this wrapping technology, which is awful. And so we've created a tokenization system that solves that problem, right? So that you can use the tokens for collateral in different types of DAP environments. And, and so basically think of us as like building almost like a neo-banking stack, one step at a time. Okay. Well, we need tokenization to bring all the assets in. Starting with crypto, you're going to see stocks coming into the Abra platform, also tokenized with yield.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  So we have tokens all coming in, and I can earn yield on all my tokens. Next step is, well, I can use them as collateral. I can borrow against all my tokens. I can borrow against my Bitcoin. I can borrow against my QQQ shares. I can borrow against my Ethereum. Right? And the next step is other apps that use those tokens as collateral, whether it's futures contracts, payments, uh, prediction markets. It's all basically commingable now into one portfolio of collateral, right? Which systems have never been able to do before. That's the value of tokenization ultimately. But think about it, we have, if you look at what NASDAQ's doing, what ICE slash NICE is doing, they're all using different blockchains, right?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  We're basically working on a way to give people kind of fungible, normalized access across all different types of tokens to earn yield, treat it as collateral, borrow against it, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Every person listening to this show, you probably own Bitcoin and you got it the same way. You paid full price on an exchange. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices and investors with sharp CPAs, and they're quietly getting theirs a very different way. They own the machines that make it, mining. Here's how it works. You buy the miners and Simple Mining hosts and runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates that you could never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. There's two reasons I find this interesting right now. One, the economics. Cheap power lets you convert electricity into Bitcoin at a discount to spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price that everyone else pays. But second, and listen closely if you've got a big income year. Miners are classified as computer equipment. Equipment means depreciation.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in year one. It's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades pointed at Bitcoin. Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year. And so with attractive financing available, you can deploy these assets without selling any of your assets to do it. This is not some garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines and was just ranked the fastest-growing company in Iowa on the INC 5000. They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.io/pomp. That's simplemining.io/pomp. Go check it out today.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  When you move more towards this tokenization thing, do the RIAs have to learn what tokens are? Or will they just interface and, um, or users and just say, hey, I'm just buying Apple. I'm just buying QQQ?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  I, I don't think they need to understand underlying what it means for a smart contract to instantiate rights in a token. Uh, what they need to understand is it represents a very different systemic way of doing things, right? And what that means is, is because AI will be layered on top, you'll have different types of portfolio construction. You'll have services you couldn't offer before, right? RIAs are about to get into the perpetual future space in this country for multiple reasons. Biggest reason being their customers want it. By the end of next year, RIAs will be able to offer perps, prediction markets, uh, access, uh, you know, tokenized yield, um, none of which they can easily offer right now, right? Without actually figuring, go building a bunch of stuff themselves, which they don't do, right?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  So this is just, like I said, it's the biggest change to the space overlaid with, you know, very, very smart AI overlords who can do portfolio construction based upon your risk tolerances, your profile and your requirements, which they can't easily do today. They, they basically have a list, right, of tell me about yourself. And it goes check, check, check, check, check. And ultimately you fit in one of 10 boxes. And that box spits out, you know, an allocation roadmap for you. And they don't like changing it for the reasons we already talked about. This should be able to do things in real time for you with an infinite number of combinations. I actually think the coolest thing, okay, so let's think about what's about to happen, right?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  So let's say there's 20 trillion sitting in wealth managers in the US and maybe another 20 trillion in Europe. Okay? When the kids start inheriting that, what's the first thing they're gonna ask? Well, can I move it to Robinhood, right? Can I, can I, can I basically go play with, you know, uh, perps and prediction markets and, you know, put the money to work and I don't want this boomer 6040 shit. I don't even know, I don't even know what treasury bonds are. I don't understand, like, and they don't, they don't make me any money. So, but what if I could basically create a portfolio which is completely tokenized, where it's all basically at the same time collateral? So it's earning yield, but I can use it as collateral for anything. So I can say to my wealth advisor, okay, Mr. Wealth Advisor, I want to, I want to down payment for my house.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  I want an instant loan against this portfolio. I also want to take 5% of, of the portfolio across the top, and I want to use it as collateral on a perps venue, so that I can basically do a, a 20% levered bet on AI, which I think is going to Valhalla right now, right? But it's just 5%. And the system will automatically know, okay, if he...

• 37:30Speaker 04

  It's like natural language, basically. You just described, I don't know if you saw recently a company launched called, I think it's called Supertake?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  I was looking at it this morning, actually.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  You basically just, yeah, hey, I think that, uh, there's gonna be a lot of snow this year.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Well, that's an idea you have or a take.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  How do you invest? Or how do you make money? One of the things that I used to always ask people is, okay, there's a lot of people who are convinced that stable coins are going to be much more popular than they are two years ago. How do you make money?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  You can't buy the stable coin because it's just a dollar, right? So then it'd be like, well, you can't buy tether stock. Circle wasn't public at the time. Then you say, okay, uh, prediction market, like, you don't know what to do, how to do it. And so like, this is promising, or at least, you know, the idea of it is that it will figure out how do you make money off of this?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Now, if that company launched three years ago in the US, they already would have gotten a call this afternoon from the SEC going, um, we'd like to talk to your, you know, counselor, whatever.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  The SEC would have a Supertake.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  They would have a Supertake, and the Supertake is you may be acting as an unregistered fiduciary. And, and so I'm not saying that that's what they're doing. I'm just saying that...

• 38:35Speaker 04

  No, they would have called, even if they would have called anybody.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. But my point is...

• 38:40Speaker 04

  They were just calling the call.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  It, it, it does open up, uh, a lot of questions around the legal frameworks against which all of these systems are going to operate under. Meaning, um, you know, DeFi, if it's pure play with no off switch, may get a pass. But if, if there's a company that you know you can shut down, that's developing systems that are processing all the questions that you're answering, right? Then do they need to be a registered robo-advisor or something like that? And we'll figure it all out. But my point is like, this is about to change, I think, in the US first and Europe second, the entire framework under which we offer fiduciary, uh, based services, uh, for people.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  And I think that it's going to be difficult for the older generation to get their arms around it. But the people who are using Robinhood now, who are going to be inheriting all of this money, it's intuitively what they're gonna want.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  But they can't have it today.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, it's, it's just, uh, I think about it with Sylvia, right? It's like, okay, we built this AI CFO. Great. Um, I literally, there's a real conversation that I had the other day.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Most of the engineers are maybe thirty or younger. So and maybe there's one like thirty-one, thirty-two, but for the most part, they're all like in their twenties. And I was talking to them and I said, you know, I need to apologize to you guys. The current product we have is because that's what I'm used to. But I'm old. Grand scheme of thing, you know, if I talk to somebody who's seventy,

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Funny how I knew where you were going with this right when you said it.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  But like, I was like, dude, my entire life, I have logged into a piece of software and I hit a dashboard and the dashboard has a bunch of numbers. And like, by the way, based on the old standards, this thing is killer. This is amazing. And you could chat. I said, dude, that's not how software is going to get built anymore. We need to go full agentic. We need to, I need to talk to it over text message and, you know, bots or Slack or like what and like, then it can do things on the platform, but like, I don't need to see the dashboard anymore.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  And so it was

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Where it would be built on the fly.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  Correct. And so like, I was going through this whole thing and I was like, and I literally apologized to him. I said, I have been looking backwards in building this. We have to now, now we've got the foundation. Now we just got to go, let's go forwards. And you could see all of them even like, I mean, I'm thirty-eight, some of them are twenty-eight, you know, ten years is a lot, but it's not a lot. And they were even like, oh, yeah. Oh, hold on a second here. Even they were thinking that way. And so I think this is gonna happen to all these businesses, right? People are gonna have to start thinking about even the way you build the product, you design it, how you think about the interface with the user, all of that stuff's gonna change. And it sounds super like tech oriented, but it is quite literally, this has penetrated the moms. And this to me is the biggest thing. My wife, all of her friends, all the little group chat she's in with the moms, et cetera.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Instinct? These women are like, this is the greatest invention literally ever. Forget sliced bread. Like, this thing is awesome. It searches my email, it manages the house schedule, it goes and finds all this stuff. And they're like, sharing and doing this and whatever. And I'm like, yo. And so my wife will, uh, will die laughing. She gonna be mad I'm gonna say this, but I walked into our bedroom the other day and she had some clothes out on the floor and she was taking pictures of them. The AI is like, you can put these outfits together. I was like, oh, it's over.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  We better start adding some value real quick.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  I was like, oh my God, it is over, right? And so like, I think people know that like moms in general, they control your personal decisions in the home. They tend to have very good word of mouth. If a product can hit that channel, whatever. But I was like, all right, hold on a second here. Like, I'm talking about this in engineering conversations at work. And then the mom groups are talking about it as well. Like, dude, it's over. Like, literally, the world has changed.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  That's it. So, okay. I think that we're gonna have these devices, the next gen devices, that are basically app-based. The OS of the device will literally be agentic orchestration and it will figure out

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Just like an overlay on top of the app.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Exactly. Well, it won't even be apps underneath it. It will be building the apps on the fly. And the interfaces will be things like AR, VR, you know, whatever, you know, maybe traditional screens as well. But on the fly, it will basically say, okay, I'm pulling in data sources. I know where your assets are. I know where your tokens are. Here's what you own. Here's the portfolio of construction. Do you want, you know, I think you should consider this, this, this, and this. And it will just do it for you on the fly by interfacing with your RIA who may ultimately legally have to push some buttons. I don't know. But my guess is if they had to do that today in three years, four years, they won't have to, uh, because it won't add a lot of value. Right? And, and so

• 43:26Speaker 03

  that's, so that OS layer basically replaces the app layer, right, with this kind of agentic orchestration that's just gonna be computing. Right? That's all it is. Right? And, and so,

• 43:42Speaker 03

  your financial life, your personal life, it just doesn't matter anymore. It's all integrated. And it's, uh, you know, I like, I was joking, I think, I think we better start working on adding value. Very quickly, right? You know, hey, honey, can you, can you, can you hang this picture on the wall? And it's gonna be, hey, um, you know, Mr. Tesla bot, can you hang this picture on the wall? And, uh,

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Listen, it is, uh, we're headed to a weird world.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  All right. Where can we send people to find more about Abra?

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Abra Global on, on Twitter is always a great place to, to interact with the company. Obviously, abra.com to, to sign up. I'm pretty active. Bill Barr on, on X as well. Uh, but just go to abra.com and find all you want about Abra.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  You don't know this. You know why I have a soft spot for you guys?

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Why?

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Because Abra Global, my Instagram account handle is Pomp Global. You know, because somebody took Pomp. Like, who took that? And he is some, some guy. And by the way, he, uh, it was a DJ. He had at Pomp on like all the platforms. I kept trying to get him to give it to me. And he was like, you know, you can imagine the numbers that he'd be throwing out.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Found out who you are. He's like, yeah. Well, I, we didn't own abra.com when I started Abra. And, um, it was, it was quite an interesting process to get a four-letter name. And not only that, it's, it works in every language. It works really well in every language. And, you know, there's a lot of words when you go from English and it sounds like, you know, you know, screw a horse and Greek or whatever, you can't do that, right? And so, so getting Abra, it was, it took me two years to get it.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  It was expensive?

• 45:12Speaker 03

  It was relative to where we were as a seed stage company. Um, it's not relative to what it's actually worth. Uh, it just happened to be a company that, um, had bought a software company, well-known software company in Europe that had bought an HR software company that was named Abra. And they didn't need it. And a friend of a friend managed to get ahold of the, the person making the decisions. All right, give us X hundred K. It's fine. And you know, call it a day. But otherwise, that we wouldn't have been able to get it.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. We just got Sylvia.com and, uh, similar product, you know, you gotta find the right person and whatever. But, uh, the at Pomp guy, he, by the way, he blocked me on Twitter because he was getting tagged so often. People would like, screw it up. He was just like, dude, he's like, what is going on? He's like crazies.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  I would have assumed, yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  But, uh, his opening offer was basically just like, retire me, my family and all of my grandchildren.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay. Very good. Um, and, and so how do you spell Sylvia, by the way?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Well, this is an interesting thing. S I L V I A. But, uh,

• 46:11Speaker 03

  So you got silvia.com?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Yes. And then we used to have, it used to be CFO Sylvia. And then we would have it spelled S Y L V I A as well. And so then you start like, okay, well, how many times could people misspell? Or how do they misspell? Like, you start trying to get all the domains. Yeah. It's like, every entrepreneur has played this game.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  We own dozens of domains at Abra.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's just like, all right, let me just keep acquiring these and pointing them. Um, all right. Thank you for doing this. Always, yeah, always great to see you as well. Excited what you guys are doing. And we'll talk soon.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely.